After staying in Santa Rosalia long enough to fill with food and water and have some local friends come to visit, we sailed away about midday. We planned to have an easy sail to Sweet Pea Cove, on nearby Is. San Marcos, but the day was fine and the sailing lovely, so we bore away and decided to cross the sea right then. Well eventually our afternoon breeze died away and after ghosting along at half a knot, we admitted defeat. We motored towards Isla Tortuga, twenty miles out from the coast, but now only a short distance away. The sailing directions and cruising guide both say that this island is steep-to and offers no anchorage, but we managed to find a seven meter ledge on the west side to drop our hook. This boulder slope was by no means perfect, but we didn’t get the anchor jammed between the rocks. By now the sea was a perfect mirror and we enjoyed a peaceful dinner and watched the sun set behind Tres Virgenes, a trio of dramatic volcanoes. Our new plan was to stay until another breeze materialized. This fortuitous roadstead anchorage provided us with two pleasant surprises that we didn’t expect when we decided to cross the sea: 1. a good night’s sleep; 2. a chance to sail nearly the whole way. Had we carried on that evening we likely would have motored through the night, instead we got underway at 530 am and had a light SE breeze that allowed us to sail away from Tortuga at about 3 knots. By midmorning it filled to 15 ESE and we had a kickin’ sail at 6 knots on a close reach. We felt it was a poetic way to end nearly 6 months of cruising in Baja. We dropped the hook in Bahia San Pedro on the mainland with enough daylight left to wander the beach and have a swim. We will be putting Narama to bed soon so we can fly back to Canada for the summer.
Fish photo: Largemouth Blenny
